August 09, 2007
So Very Broken
When I went to bed last night, B. and I had successfully - or so we thought - moved my blog to WordPress, fully redesigned. Oh, it looked so sharp. I spent about two hours refreshing it every five minutes, just to make sure it was all working fine. We checked it on the Mac. We checked it on the PC. All was well.
And then, overnight, all that hard work morphed into what you see here. As best as I can tell, Moveable Type (my old blogging software) got off its tired, cranky ass and whooped up on WordPress, possibly beating the code out of it with a walking stick.
Oh boy.
Did I mention that Clara Jane put herself to bed at 7 PM last night, and has been awake since 6:00? I was up until nearly 2 AM, as I become even more nocturnal when it's this hot.
Bear with us. Since we're up so early, we're going to take advantage of it and run some early-morning errands. Then we're going to spend the day at Cooperella, where I'm going to request that they pack my body in ice while I pump coffee directly into my gullet.
Posted by Robin at 07:01 AM | Comments (0)
August 07, 2007
It's Here! The Fourth Annual Heat-Wave Lock-Down!
As I'm sure you might have gathered, I hate summer. I don't like temperatures to get above 75 degrees. I'm not a big fan of the sun. In a perfect world, I like overcast, a little chilly, and perhaps a little damp. In a perfect world, St. Louis would be either Seattle, Portland or London. But this isn't a perfect world, and once a year (at least) the heat gets so vile that I declare Heat-Wave Lock-Down Day.
That day was today. While I love snow days, I hate heat-wave lock-down days. Heat makes me nervous and uncomfortable. Snow days are filled with cozy things like long-simmering soup, making homemade cookies, and snuggling on the couch with hot beverages. Heat-wave lock-down days are filled with things like waiting for the air conditioner to freeze up, doing everything in my power to not turn on the stove, and having mild panic attacks any time someone else's sweaty, clammy skin touches mine.
Well, except for Clara Jane. I'm used to her crawling all over me. That didn't make it any better when, this afternoon, I blew a raspberry on her bare armpit and found myself with a mouthful of sweat.
There is not enough Klonopin in this house for me to survive more than one Heat-Wave Lock-Down with two bored dogs and a child with sweaty armpits, on which I put my mouth.
There is nothing to write about on Heat-Wave Lock-Down Day. Sweaty armpits are the height of excitement. We've watched far too much TV. We jumped on the spare bedroom bed for so long that it's likely to cause Immediate Lumbar Failure in the next person who attempts to sleep on it. I did knit a little while Clara Jane played with beads. Then I kept myself busy by picking hundreds of wee little seed beads out of berber carpet.
I could finish the new blog design, but it's hard to do that when my brain got bruised from jumping on the bed.
This is one of those lulls that always happens at the end of a season. It just seems more extreme to me in summer. There's lots of cool stuff to look forward to. Crafta Nostra and Strange Folk Festival. Wilco in my old college town with B. (who hasn't been to a show with me since he took me to see Springsteen for our anniversary five years ago), Kristina, and possibly someone I've known since I was, I don't know, Clara Jane's age.
The pink hair-dyeing is coming up in a few weeks. And I'm starting to plan a new tattoo. There's also a birthday trip to Memphis to see someone peachy coming in October.
I dislike living in anticipation. Today was fun, really. I had a day with no responsibilities in which to play with my kid. That's awesome. Even if her pits are sweaty.
Posted by Robin at 08:16 PM | Comments (5)
August 06, 2007
How Tired? So Tired.
It's got to be the heat. That, and not getting much sleep last night. Why? Because of the heat.
(I shouldn't complain. I'm a lucky, lucky person who has the luxury of air conditioning in order to remain at a temperature that makes being alive possible, all while contributing to global warming. I'm a part of the circle of life. A sweaty, sweaty part of the circle of life.)
Anyway, I'd hoped to unveil the new, improved blog layout tonight. Not happening. Too lazy/tired. I'm so lazy/tired that I'm using my old PC. I'm too tired/lazy even try to get my Macbook to connect to the fussy, crabby piece of shit wireless router. It's the third one our ISP has given us, and the third on that won't hold a connection. The Macbook connects just fine and dandy when we're out and about. At home? The router's a lot like me and just wants to take a little nap.
But I'm not whiny today. No! You know a good way to spend one of the hottest days of the year? Why, in my basement rumpus room with a bunch of friends and kids, eating spinach-bacon salad, real Greek feta, homemade cheese - that's right, I said homemade cheese - and homemade hummus with enough garlic to make the entire state of Illinois vampire-free until at least 2018.
I'm tired and dehydrated enough that this could very well turn into one of those, "Gosh, I have the best friends ever" posts, but I try to save those for when I've been drinking. But it's true. Lately I've been constantly amazed at the people who've landed in my life, usually by really weird coincidences.
I knew that parenthood would change my perspective on friendship. Hell, it changed my perspective before I was even pregnant. When we were trying to get pregnant I saw the need to remove several people from my life because I knew that, for various reasons, they wouldn't be good for me.
More of the same during Clara Jane's first two years. Lots of painful housecleaning. I know I did what I had to do, but that didn't make it any easier.
If anything, my patience for people I'm not legally required to take care of starting running low in early 2006, and the supply was totally depleted by the end of that year. I started accepting that I'm an adult, which meant my social circle was going to shrink. So be it.
Then a funny thing happened. I started meeting all these people. Some are moms. Some aren't, but somehow have this innate wiring that allows them to be empathetic to their friends with kids. We all seem to have gone through similar friendship house-cleanings in the past few years and have come to similar realizations: life's too short and our priorities too important to waste time on stupid, piddly shit. In the little time we have together, we're either going to tackle real problems in our lives (without trying to "fix" each other) or we're going to have some damn fun.
Today was a little of the former, and a lot of the latter. We chased each others' kids and corralled them as needed. There was none of that shitty and mean competitive mothering crap going on. Just a lot of kids playing, and a lot of gals laughing so hard they couldn't hear the doorbell over themselves.
And did I mention there was homemade cheese, too?
Gosh. I have the best friends ever!
Posted by Robin at 09:40 PM | Comments (4)
August 05, 2007
What I Did This Weekend
- Didn't blog.
- Knitted some socks that take me right back to The Wheel Thing Roller Rink, circa 1982. I love these socks more than I love my dogs.
- Drank beer at a local pub with a friend. There was live music, old couples dancing to Frank Sinatra covers, and absolutely no credit cards accepted. It was awesome! Upon leaving, I watched a few silent minutes of "The Simpsons Movie" from the drive-in theater next door to the bar. Reveled in how much I love living in this town.
- Celebrated Little Eddie's second birthday. Clara Jane celebrated Little Eddie's birthday the same way she celebrated Abby's birthday last week: by eating exactly two cupcakes-worth of icing and then going off to play with her father instead of the other kids.
- Worked on those major blog changes I've been threatening for ages. They're almost finished, I promise. Although I lied a bit; I worked on the major blog changes for about five minutes before I got completely befuddled by the complexities of the five-minute install and yelled for B. to help me.
- Sweated. Profusely. Just by sitting on my ass in my air conditioned house. I fucking hate August.
- Made arrangements to have the Monday playdate at my house, instead of going to the coffeehouse that's gonna feel the wrath of our motherly ire by the lack of our presence. Oh yeah.
- Went to Hawaii with Clara Jane. And by "Hawaii" I mean, "the basement". Imagination? Check!
- Made silly lists instead of engaging my brain enough to make a real blog entry.
Posted by Robin at 11:46 PM | Comments (5)
August 02, 2007
Bridges, Socks, and How to Create a Sleep Disorder
I don't have salmonella. Having learned my lesson, from now on I'll avoid B.'s Chicken Sashimi.
Whenever something bad happens, I feel like I should say something. Then I feel arrogant for thinking I've got anything particularly insightful to add in the commentary of tragedies. Everyone I know in Minneapolis (including The Cuz) is safe, and for that I'm extremely thankful.
I've never been afraid of bridges, but I have to admit to being shaky during today's two trips over the Poplar Street Bridge, the massive interstate bridge that connects downtown St. Louis to the rest of the world. It was either stay home and give myself that form of post-traumatic stress disorder you get from watching the same traumatic footage over and over on CNN, or hang out at the coffeehouse and yarn shop with a few of my friends. I opted for the latter, bridge anxiety be damned, and I'm glad.
In much more superficial news, I finished another pair of socks today. This one took 16 days, which is the fastest I've ever knit a pair of socks. They're also my first foray in the world of knitalongs. A pair of socks each month from August through December? I can do that. Wanna see my first pair, in which I knit a whopping two inches during the month of August? For guilt's sake I'm going to finish another pair I started awhile ago and haven't finished.
Here's the ones I finished, in the always-lovely Dyeabolical Yarns.
Now that I've depressed you with bridge talk and bored you with knitting talk, you want to read cute stuff about my kid, right? Or about childhood trauma.
I have lovely parents. Really. They're good people. My mother, though, has some rather sick ideas about what's funny. Then again, so do I.
When I was about Clara Jane's age, I got stuck under the couch while foraging for JC Penney catalogs. I explicitly remember crying and shrieking for help and my mother coming into the room. Upon seeing my ass and legs hanging from below the couch with the front half of my wee body wedged under a large piece of furniture, she did what any mother would do:
She busted up laughing and said, "Hold on! Don't move! I've gotta get the camera!"
And they wonder why I'm claustrophobic.
There are photos in my childhood photo album of me, stuck under the couch. But there aren't any photos of me at age eight, stuck to a tire swing because my nylon nightgown had gotten twisted around the rope. Not that she didn't take pictures on that occasion. Oh no. I just managed to steal them from the family album about a decade ago and she's never getting them back!
And they wonder why I have panic attacks.
Anyway, I'm obviously not a fan of photographing my child in occasions when she might be scared, upset, or crying. I always hated those damn pictures of myself. However, the other night I walked into Clara Jane's room while she was sleeping. Since she was peacefully snoozing away and not showing any sign of fear or peril, I had no problem with dashing across the house and down the stairs to fetch my camera:
It's a bit hard to see exactly what's going on, but she's kneeling on the hardwood floor, sound asleep. And this isn't an isolated incident. This happens about once a week. Somehow, the bottom half of her body winds up on the floor and she either sleeps through the fall or just gets cozy and goes back to sleep. Eventually I check on her and haul her back into bed, sometimes after a photo shoot.
And we'll wonder why she has scoliosis and a sleep disorder someday.
Posted by Robin at 09:49 PM | Comments (5)